


portraits of the interbellum

by Quietbang



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Art, Class Issues, Epistolary, Let Will Retire Damnit, M/M, Murder Mystery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Showing Love Through Marble Statuary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:13:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26260195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quietbang/pseuds/Quietbang
Summary: This is how it begins, that snowy night where Hannibal turned himself in out of love or malice or curiosity of a mix of all three. When Will asked him to run and he didn’t. When he turned himself in for reasons known only to himself and left Will alone to deal with all of it, with months of interminable hearings and the night-sweats that never really went away and the terrifying certainty that he was being manipulated but wanting so desperately for this to be true, for it to be the thing that made sense, wishing his transformation had never occurred while knowing it was inevitable. Was he happier then? No, that can’t be right. He has never been happy.No, that’s not the beginning, either.So perhaps instead it begins like this, the last time he was happy.
Relationships: Molly Graham/Will Graham, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	portraits of the interbellum

**Author's Note:**

> content warning for implications of past abuse as well as extreme pretentiousness

It starts like this. 

It is a beautiful summer afternoon, and Will can hear the sounds of barking dogs that indicates the mail carrier has arrived. Unlike the dozens of other dogs she meets on her route, these ones are well trained. 

It’s just that they aren’t trained  _ not _ to bark. 

Will descends the staircase slowly, wincing a little. There must be a storm coming, and his scars burn as he stretches. He muffles a groan when he stoops down to pick up the mail and begins to sort through it. Bills, flyers, a notice from the vet that the dogs are due for their vaccinations -- he pockets that one, making a mental note to call them tomorrow. A plain envelope with a clear plastic window and a return address that Will recognized as Jack’s. 

He ripped that one in two and threw it into the garbage without looking at it. 

He flips through the rest, and then -- he sees it. 

His heart stops. 

He would recognize Hannibal Lecter’s handwriting until the day he died and likely long afterwards, and he hates that Hannibal can still affect him in this way, that somehow he has never learned in his bones that the man he loved and admired was dead or had never existed and instead he had been an admirer of his worst selves as well as his best. He puts it in his pocket, determined not to open it, not to do anything that could upset the delicate balance he has worked so hard to achieve. 

(And it  _ is  _ hard, every day, because he is and he is not Will Graham and he is and he is not Hannibal Lecter and he is and he is not a father, first to Abigail Hobbes and now to Wally and most important of all he is and he is not a good man and everything he touches turns to ash or is set aflame. A healthy mix of medication, whiskey, and self-denial gets him through.) 

He considers showing it to Molly and re-considers, not because she would blame him for the letter or even blame him for responding or for bringing the eyes of a shark to their little nest of minnows. But because he wants this for himself. It has been so long since he has had something for himself. 

No. 

Wait. 

Stop. 

  
  


_ This  _ is how it begins, that snowy night where Hannibal turned himself in out of love or malice or curiosity of a mix of all three. When Will asked him to run and he didn’t. When he turned himself in for reasons known only to himself and left Will alone to deal with all of it, with months of interminable hearings and the night-sweats that never really went away and the terrifying certainty that he was being manipulated but wanting so desperately for this to be true, for it to be the thing that made sense, wishing his transformation had never occurred while knowing it was inevitable. Was he happier then? No, that can’t be right. He has never been happy. 

No, that’s not the beginning, either. 

So perhaps instead it begins like this, the last time he was happy. 

He’s 5 years old and blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, his mother squeezing his shoulder in pride. 

“Blow them out, Willie baby,” she says, her Louisiana drawl sweet like honey and brittle like pride. He hasn’t had a lot of good days lately -- Daddy’s lost his job again and as mama’s attempts at pulling him out of the bottle fail she retreats, first to the bedroom in their small trailer and then outside in the small patch of land in front, tending her garden. School was bad, this year, noisy and dirty and there was  _ too much _ , too many people who wanted him to talk, too many people who wanted him to sit still, teachers whose touch burned as they jerked his chin up to force eye contact. The eye contact burned, too. 

Today was a good day, though. Willie had been good. He hasn’t had a problem at school all week, he hadn’t gotten into any fights, and he found a nest of waterthrush by the stream that morning. Momma had loved it, and even Daddy had smiled a bit, and had let Will sit in the corner of his workshop while Daddy crafted fishing lures as long as he was quiet. 

He blows out the candles and whispers something under his breath.

“What did you wish for, baby?” Momma asked 

“I can’t tell you, Momma,” WIll answers. “Then it won’t come true.” 

She smiles and kisses him but looks sad in her eyes and Will meets her clouded blue eyes with his own inquisitive ones and asks “Mama, what’s wrong?

She smiles, and shakes her head. “Nothing’s wrong.” 

Will frowns, and pats her clumsily with his sticky fingers. “You make a wish, momma” 

“What?” She says, smiling slightly. “Don’t be silly baby, it’s your birthday.” 

“If it’s my birthday, does that mean I get to do whatever I want?”

She laughs and squeezes him tighter. “Not  _ whatever _ you want, but it is your special day.” 

He looks at her seriously. “I want you to make a wish.” 

She laughs and relents. “All right.” 

She reaches into the pocket of her housedress and pulls out a lighter. After carefully re-lighting the candles, she turns to him. “Let’s blow them out together, ok, Will?”

Will nods seriously. 

“Ok,” she says, “On three -- one, two, three!” 

They blow out the candle and close their eyes. 

Will wishes for another dog. 

He opens his eyes to see his mother looking at him, her eyes filled with love and sadness. “What did you wish for, Momma?”

She smiles. “I thought you said wishes were supposed to be a secret!’

“Only if it’s  _ your  _ birthday, and it’s not, it’s mine.” He frowns, crosses his arms, looking at her with the seriousness and conviction only a newly-turned five year old could muster. 

“Well then,” she says, pulling the candles out of the cake and turning to the side of their narrow kitchen to pick up a knife. “I wished that you would always be as happy as you are right now, and that you would grow up big and strong, and that you would always,  _ always,  _ remember that I love you more than anything. Do you think you can do that for me? Remember?”

“I can remember,” Will says stubbornly. “I know I can.” 

She kisses the top of his head, ruffles his haze of dark curls. “Thank you baby. Let’s have some cake now.” 

It was their last birthday together. Daddy lost his job again and fell even deeper into the bottle until he was like a hungry dog, snarling at anyone who could get close to him. Momma’s ivory skin became dappled with shades of blue and green and purple and Will spent as much time as he could in the woods, away from home, eating stolen candy and reading stolen books. One day he was lying deep within the woods, listening to the stream and watching the minnows dart around the rocks, when he smelled smoke. 

He ignored it and went back to the minnows. Someone was probably burning a campfire. 

But the smoke didn’t go away, and after a few minutes Will sat up and stretched, turning his head to the direction of the smoke. 

Or at least, he started to. 

Next to him, so close that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his skin, was a doe. Sandy, the stray that Will had met in the woods one day and who followed him everywhere but never got to go home with him, was still, and didn’t bark. 

He looked at the doe in wonder, marvelling at her beautiful softness and other-worldly strangeness. 

The doe looked back. 

“Can I touch you?” he asked, then felt stupid. Does didn’t speak english. But Will hated it when people touched him and people were always doing it and he didn’t want to make the beautiful creature in front of him feel like he did, like he was sick and burning and sticky and grabbed at from all directions. 

To his surprise, the doe moved closer until her heavy soft head was resting on his small shoulder, and Will took that as an invitation to wrap his arms around her. 

Running his hands along her soft, sleek sides, he noticed something strange. Lumps of scar tissue rested underneath her fur, maybe from a near miss with buckshot. A patch of missing fur on her back, displaying a small silver scar. 

“What’s your name?” Will asked. 

The doe didn’t answer, of course it didn’t, it was an animal -- but it shifted, revealing powerful and graceful muscle, until he and the doe were nose-to-nose and making direct eye contact. 

It didn’t burn. 

The doe shifted again, until its warm, wet nose was pressed against his cheek. Will laughed slightly and let the warmth spread inside of him until he felt happy. 

There was the rough rasp of a tongue on his cheek, and Will blinked and realized he was crying, which didn’t make sense, he wasn’t sad, he was happy, he was lucky, he was gonna run home and tell Mama about the beautiful creature he met in the woods who chose him, chose  _ him _ , little, dirty, crazy Willie. 

The doe softly licked his cheeks until no tears remained, and when Will chanced another look at her face he realized that  _ she  _ was crying, which didn’t make sense, deer don’t cry, but maybe they did after all and Will was the first person who got the chance to  _ look _ . 

“Why are you crying?” He asked softly. 

There was a sound in the distance, a sudden crack that pierced the silence and startled Will and the doe alike. 

Clouds were rolling in, and Will was a good southern boy, knew that a summer thunderstorm would be there any minute. 

“I gotta go home,” he said to the doe. “You could come with me, if you want.”

The doe shook her head softly, and licked his cheek again, and again he felt full of warmth and peace. 

“Are you sure?” He asked. “Momma would love you.”

The doe shook her head again, and butted him under the chin with her velvet-soft nose, giving him one last kiss. 

“It’s gonna storm,” Will mused, looking at the sky. “I gotta go. Will you be here tomorrow?”

He looked back down from the clouds. The doe was gone. 

There were no tracks in the ground indicating she had ever been there, just the slight warm stickiness on Will’s cheeks from where she had kissed him and a small piece of fur on the ground. 

He picked it up, put it in his pocket, and went home. 

  
  


This is not the story of what happened next. If it was, you’d know that when Will got home the trailer was burning, his daddy was nowhere to be found, and that when Will tried to go inside he was stopped by the strong arms of a neighbour who was watching the blaze, holding him tight in his arms as Will kicked and screamed and tried to go back inside, you’d know that by the time the fire department arrived it was too late, that when Will’s daddy came home from the bar that night he found a smoking wreckage where their family once was and that soon after he and Will, no longer a family, not really, not without Momma, would leave town and never return, spending the next 10 years hopping between trailer parks and bedbug-ridden hotel rooms and couches in the trailers of Daddy’s friends. You’d know that Will grew up quick and grew up hard and grew up strong but that he also grew up scared, you’d know Will never stopped looking for that doe, you’d know that Will learned how not to cry when hunger felt like a fist in his stomach or when he was being punished for some imaginary transgression, that physical pain and hunger meant nothing to him anymore because when it happens again and again and again you become used to it, immune, a vaccination against the fracturing of a dream because you have never allowed yourself to dream again. 

But this is not that story. That is a story for another day. 

So it starts like that but it ends like this: 

It is a beautiful summer day, and Will has begun to allow himself to dream again, to imagine what it would be to build a little family with Molly and their son and if sometimes those dreams turn to ash in his mouth and if his scars ache and burn in the heat and if he still can’t sleep, not really, not properly, but that is nothing new because he hasn’t slept properly since he was 5 years old -- and if this isn’t happiness it’s the closest he will ever get, and isn’t that enough? 

Shouldn’t be that enough?

He takes the letter upstairs, to his study, and closes the door. 

He pours himself a drink. 

And he opens the letter. 

_ My dearest Will,  _

_ I am not surprised that I have not heard from you, and yet I find myself disappointed. You once said you didn’t think I was crazy -- does that opinion still hold? Are you angry that I would lie in my own defense? Forgive me, Will, but I do not think I would do well in prison.  _

_ Now, no doubt, you are thinking many things. ‘Why are you contacting me?’ ‘Why did you hurt all those people?’ ‘Why turn myself in?’ _

_ Forgive me, Will, but I will not be answering any of those questions today. Perhaps, instead, I will ask you some in turn. How are you? How is your little family? Do they know who you truly are? _

_ I know you think I am incapable of love. The opposite is true. I am capable of great love and compassion, as you know well. I simply choose when and where to exercise it.  _

_ Is that the difference between you and I, ultimately? I have a choice, and you do not. Is that what really angers you?  _

_ I have no expectation that you will respond to this letter, and I doubt you will visit me. Nevertheless, I remain,  _

_ Yours,  _

_ Hannibal Lecter.  _

Will crumpled the letter in his fists, gritting his teeth against the onslaught of emotion. He didn’t want this, he didn’t need this, how in the hell was Hannibal allowed to simply send letters to a man he had loved and tried to kill and who had loved and tried to kill him in turn?

He shuffled into the bathroom, wincing. Rain was battering the windows, now, and any minute there would be dogs howling and scratching at the door to get back inside. 

He laid the crumpled letter in the sink, and pulled a lighter from his pocket, and just before he touched flame to paper he noticed something he had missed before. Something on the back. 

He carefully uncrumpled it. 

The lighter dropped out of his hand. 

His hand which was perfectly re-created on the back of the paper. 

His hand which was shaking like a leaf now but which on the paper was strong and... beautiful? Tendons carefully shaded, freckles, the light dappling of hair -- small pinprick scars from fish hooks on his finger tips, a barely visible dappling of tiny circular scars that Will had almost forgotten but which have been marked in silver on his skin for decades, if you looked closely. 

Nobody had looked closely, before. 

Will tried very hard not to look closely. 

He glances at the paper, lying limply in the sink; at the lighter, lying on the ground where it fell; at his own shaking hands. He has a headache. 

Carefully, methodically, his hands shaking almost too much to control, he picks up the letter, folds it neatly, and tucks it in his back pocket. 

The energy drained out of him from that simple act, he sinks to his knees and breaks anew. 

\---

Molly finds him there, an hour or a day or a lifetime later, curled into a ball in the furthest corner of the bathroom, bounded on both sides by the comfort of walls. 

She is sunshine, sweet like his mother but with none of her brittleness, and an impossible strength Will had never seen before -- or, that’s not right. He’d never seen anyone with that kind of strength who hadn’t been destroyed by it. 

“Will?” she asks softly. “What happened?”

Will shakes his head, he doesn’t know how to explain, how to explain that his thoughts are running against each other in every direction and at once he is 5 and 40 and 100, that he is so old and yet too young for this, that he has always been something uglier and more monstrous than she can know and that the only person who ever saw, the only person who looked through his skin to see where the silver and purple were painted upon his soul, that there was only one person who had truly known him and thus only one person who could truly love him, couldn’t explain that this intrusion had destroyed every barrier he had carefully erected to maintain an element of sanity. 

So instead, he says after a moment, “I got a letter.” 

She raises an eyebrow. “Jack Crawford again? I swear to God I’m gonna kill that man.” 

Will snorts. “I know a few people who would agree with you, but, no. Not him.” 

She pauses, breathes. “That’s who wrote to you, isn’t it? Someone who agrees with me about Jack?”

He lets his eyes close, nods. He is so tired. 

“Hannibal wrote to you,” she says softly. “What did he say?”

He thrusts the letter at her. “You can read it.” 

She shakes her head. “No.”

That startles him out of the fuzzy stupor that always followed him out of a meltdown. “No?” He creases his forehead in confusion. “Why wouldn’t you want to read it?”

She smiles gently, strokes his cheek, and it is only when she runs a calloused thumb down his cheek that he realizes he must be crying. “I have no interest in Hannibal Lecter.” 

That sounds impossible to Will. Everyone is interested in Hannibal. If they are interested in Will Graham at all, it is only because they are interested in Hannibal Lecter. 

He nods, and swallows, and does not voice his doubts. 

“It’s not what he said, really,” he says after a moment. “It’s, uh, well -- flip it over. You don’t have to read it, just -- just flip it over, please.” 

She doesn’t force eye contact. It’s one of the things Will loves about her. Instead, she makes sure her face is within his range of vision -- shifting from their current position, him curled protectively in the corner and her next to him, one arm wrapped tightly around his shoulder, until she is on her knees in front of him. She smiles, and Will doesn’t have to look in her eyes to know that she is conveying a steady strength and a promise. Whatever it is, she will not hate him for it. 

“Are you sure?” She asks quietly. 

He shakes his head and bites out a harsh chuckle. “I am never  _ sure _ , Molly. You know that.” 

“That’s not true,” she says quietly, and picks up the letter. 

She looks at it, blinks, frowns.

“Your hand,” she says quietly. “Like an artist’s study.” 

She moves it closer to her eyes, pouring over the details, and looks back at Will’s hand. “I hadn’t noticed those scars before.” 

Will shrugs. “They’re old. I’d forgotten them myself.” 

Molly is too smart for that. “No, you hadn’t.” 

“No, I hadn’t,” Will agrees. 

“It’s beautiful,” she says quietly. 

“Everything he does is,” Will says, equally quietly. “He doesn’t know how to do something badly.” 

There is silence for a moment, and then -- 

“Oh, Will,” Molly sighs softly. “What are we going to do?”

“Nothing,” he bites out. “We aren’t doing anything. I don’t want to talk with Hannibal Lecter, I do not want to receive letters from Hannibal Lecter, I want  _ nothing to do with Hannibal Lecter _ .” 

She nods, breathes with him. “How did he get our address? He’s supposed to be under 24/7 guard.” 

Will smirks slightly and shakes his head. “He’s only there because he wants to be. He could escape any time he wanted to.” 

She nods again. “Should we be worried?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. He asked me once if I wanted to take his life from him, and if not that, his freedom.” 

“And you did.” 

“No,” Will says quietly. “No, I didn’t take anything from him. We never took anything from him that wasn’t given freely.” 

Molly sighs, stretches, and stands up. “I need to go put something in the oven for Wally. Will you be joining us?”

Will feels a sickly roiling of guilt in his stomach. “I don’t -- I’m sorry -- I don’t know if I can eat anything.”

“Okay,” Molly says. 

“Okay.” 

After a while, Will gets up, stretches, washes his face and pours himself a drink. He sits on the covered porch, slowly smoking a cigarette. He hasn’t smoked in years, but he keeps an emergency pack in his desk, and tonight -- when Hannibal let him know that he had seen his scars, and he must have known, of course he knew, they weren’t the right size to be anything else and they weren’t the right angle to be an accident or self-inflicted -- well. Tonight seemed appropriate. 

His eyes closed briefly as he let the warmth of the whiskey and nicotine suffuse through his body. A study, Molly had called it. Like an artist's study. 

Will has never been vain, knows that he has never been someone who drew others to him for his beauty -- whatever beauty that was there was cracked, clouded by his mind and personality and demeanor and -- and Hannibal found him beautiful. 

Hannibal had maimed him and scarred him and tried to kill him but he still found Will beautiful, and that was what confused him because Hannibal had seen the worst, cracked parts of him and that was what he liked, not his eyes or dark hair or skin. Even at the end, when it became apparent that Hannibal wasn’t going to kill him,  _ couldn’t  _ kill him for some reason, Will is under no illusions that had it been possible to peel his skin off and leave him alive and with his mind intact, he would have done so. 

But a study. Will understands studies, though he has never been much of an artist -- but he has been an involuntary student of human behaviour for 40 years and a voluntary one for 20 and he knows what it is to want to break down every aspect of something which you cannot have. 

Hannibal had looked at him, had looked at him closely enough that he could recreate his hand perfectly from memory, exposing parts that Will had forgotten or tries to, he had  _ looked _ and he had not looked away. 

Winston is at his feet, pressed against his legs, and Will absently scratches him behind his ears and looks at his hand in the setting sunlight and  _ wonders _ . 

He promises himself he won’t write back. 

\---

He writes back. 

He knows this is foolish, is tantamount to asking a tiger over for tea and yet -- if you could ask a tiger over for tea, wouldn’t you? Apex predators are beautiful provided you are not their prey and sometimes even then. 

_ Dear Hannibal,  _

_ I know it is useless to ask you questions, because you will not answer them unless they amuse you. My only hope, then, is that you find me an amusing enough diversion to be worthy of your time.  _

_ Why did you surrender, Hannibal? Why didn’t you run?  _

_ As for my family -- nice try. You and I both know that you could discover the answer to many of your questions easily, without leaving your cell -- in fact, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t already.  _

_ To answer your question, the only one you can’t answer yourself -- they know who I am, or at least as well as I know myself.  _

_ That’s not an answer to your question, I know, but it’s the closest thing to it.  _

_ Why did you write to me? Is it boredom? Cruelty? Didn’t your mother ever teach you that it’s rude to play with your food? _

_ You may have marked me, Hannibal, but you didn’t claim me.  _

_ Will Graham  _

He doesn’t receive a reply, and as the days stretch to weeks and the fall rolls on he begins to convince himself that Hannibal has forgotten him, and that shouldn’t make him feel bad, that shouldn’t make him feel like this, he should be grateful that he is no longer the favoured toy of a tiger in a cage, but -- it does. Make him feel bad, that is. 

Hannibal doesn’t write, but Jack does, over and over again until Molly threatens to wring the man’s neck herself, didn’t he understand that Will had sacrificed enough? (Will knows that he hasn’t, not in Jack’s eyes, that Jack is Captain Ahab and he has caught the white whale and doesn’t know what to do with it, that Jack is still half-convinced that Will is a traitor, that he burns with jealousy because Jack has lost everything and has replaced it with hunger and Will had stepped into the fire and been burned to a crisp and reborn and he didn’t deserve his happiness, didn't deserve his family, in the way that Jack did. It wasn’t right that Jack was the one who was alone while Will had a family, a facsimile of normalcy, all things he had never deserved and never planned for but wanted and now, like the cat who caught it’s tail, he doesn’t know what to do with it. 

It’s Christmas, or near enough, and Will is almost happy, lets himself be swept up in the joy and excitement of Molly and Wally, and if he still sweats through his sheets and if he doesn’t sleep and if sometimes he locks himself away in his study for hours on end, staring at nothing and everything, well -- it was as close to happiness as a man like him deserved.

It’s evening, and he and Molly are curled around each other on the couch, Will caught between trying to absorb her warmth, her energy, while preventing his own filth from contaminating her. It was a difficult dance, and one that he tried not to think about too much less the fragile equilibrium shatter. Will’s life is in essence, a series of experiments, each with a dozen dependent and independent variables, where each individual component failure risks catastrophe. 

After some time, Molly sits up, stretches, and steels herself. “Will.”

Will looks at her. “What is it?”

She breathes deeply, straightens 

“You’ve got mail. Or, well, we do.”

Will frowns at her. “And this is cause for concern why?”

He knows the answer to this question before he asks it, and he doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want another person in his life determined to protect him from himself, doesn’t want Hannibal’s all-consuming presence looming over their little family. 

She sighs. “Hannibal... sent us a Christmas card. And a present for you.” 

“A present?” Will frowns. “Postal bomb doesn’t seem like his style, but I guess prison changes a man.” 

Molly rolls her eyes. “It only came this morning -- I haven’t been hiding it from you for a week or anything, I just -- you were having such a good day.” 

Will nods, his mouth dry. It had been a good day. Nevertheless.

“Let me see it,” he said quietly. 

“It’s in the kitchen. Pantry. Behind that weird cereal Wally made us buy.” She watches him carefully. “Are you going to be ok?”

Will shrugged and gave what he hoped was a smile. “As OK as ever, I expect.” 

In the pantry -- overwhelmed by the sights and smells of spices and snacks and sugar, the ever-comforting abundance, he stops for a moment and breathes again, allowing his eyesight to adjust to the dim light. 

(When Pandora opened her box and all the horrors of the world escaped, she was able to keep hope trapped within.)

It lies tucked behind a seasonally-themed box of CapNCrunch, in a nondescript cream envelope. Next to it, a thin package, wrapped neatly in plain brown paper.

When he opens the card he prays that hope will not be trapped within, closes his eyes, and looks. 

It is a beautiful card,  _ St. Jerome and The Lion _ , a kindly looking man extracting a thorn from the lion’s paw, and Will tries so hard not to think about that that could mean -- 

\-- St. Jerome had been martyred, in the end. 

The inside was innocuous, the kind of message one might send a cousin or a business partner one didn’t particularly like but was obligated to tolerate. 

Ok. 

Unsettling, but ok. Will did not miss the lack of warmth. He didn’t. 

The package now. 

It was beautiful. Where before it had been an artist’s study, this was a finished piece, none of the sketch lines that had marred the study of his hand -- this was his arm, now, or arms, forearms and hands clearly visible as they tied a fishing lure, shades of sinew and scar tissue. The nails on the hands were bitten to the quick, and Will glanced down shamefully to confirm. He hadn’t realized he had started to do that again. 

The scarring and freckles were faithfully recorded, including -- and here Will stops in shock, reeling with possibilities -- a dark mark that on Will’s arm is an angry red, the legacy of a minor mishap with some fireworks on the 4th of July. 

Four months after Hannibal had been imprisoned. 

Four months since Will had shown his face at the FBI. 

But it was painted alongside the other relics of foolishness and rage, his own and other people’s, that dapple his body in angry reds and ghostly silvers, and that’s not right, he was supposed to be free, even if Hannibal had refused his offer of freedom. 

It seems at once impossible that he could know and impossible that he couldn’t, Will wasn’t sure how -- Molly wouldn’t betray him and Wally wouldn’t know how, but perhaps -- one of the people in town, one of the older women who cluck at him sternly in the grocery store or the older men in the hardware store who didn’t bother pretending that they weren’t talking about him. 

Or, perhaps -- he had simply known. 

A shark can always smell when there is blood in the water. 

**Author's Note:**

> St Jerome and Lion is a beautiful painting by an unknown medieval artist and can be found [ here ](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/250709/master-of-the-murano-gradual-saint-jerome-extracting-a-thorn-from-a-lion's-paw-italian-second-quarter-of-15th-century/?dz=0.5000,0.6536,0.73)


End file.
